Tips and advice straight from the Lightroom team.

Archive for April, 2015

The Photography team is proud to share the latest updates available to you in the Creative Cloud Photography. Starting with last year’s Lightroom mobile launch on iPad, we outlined a vision for a connected photographic workflow that allows you to create, access, organize, edit and share your photos from all of your devices. You provided lots of feedback on both the vision and our strategy and I’m happy to announce that we’ve made substantial improvements to Lightroom across all your devices that help you organize, edit, and share your photos in a fast, easy way with the highest quality.

Today we’re happy to announce a major update to Creative Cloud Photography, with a brand new version of Lightroom on the desktop and updates across all pieces of the Lightroom ecosystem.

Lightroom CC on the desktop

HDR Merge: Create natural-looking or surreal images from extremely high-contrast scenes. Using HDR merge, you can easily combine multiple shots taken with different exposure settings into a single high dynamic range image. Click here to learn more.

Performance Improvements: Get more done, faster. Lightroom takes advantage of compatible graphics processors to boost its overall speed, especially in the Develop module.

Facial Recognition: Easily find and organize photos of family and friends with new Facial Recognition features in Lightroom CC. Click here to learn more.

Advanced video slideshows: Combine still images, video and music with professional effects like pan and zoom. Click here to learn more.

Filter Brush: Precisely control which parts of your image are affected by the Graduated or Radial filters. Now you can use a brush to edit the filter’s mask, adding or subtracting filter effects wherever you want.

Lightroom on mobile

Android Tablet Support: Previously only available on Android phones, now you can sync, edit, organize and share on Android tablets as well.

Native DNG support on Android: Android 5.0 (aka “Lollipop”) now allows you to shoot photos in raw, and saves them as DNG files. You can now import those DNG files directly from your Android device.

Android SD card support: You can now specify local storage to an SD card rather than internal device storage.

TIFF support on iOS: If you’re creating TIFF files on your iOS device, you can now import and edit them using Lightroom.

Improved crop experience on iOS: We simplified the number of tiles in our crop UI so you can now easily find aspect ratios, and we added an auto-straighten function, directly leveraging the Upright technology.

Sharing and storytelling options

Support for more apps and devices: Lightroom is now more easily integrated with other Adobe apps like Adobe Voice and Slate on your iPad. You can also now use Lightroom on more devices, including Android tablets in addition to iOS phones, tablets and Android phones.

Yes, it is. However, the perpetual license doesn’t provide access to Lightroom mobile or Lightroom web.

Q: What are the minimum requirements for GPU support?

Minimum requirements are a graphics card that runs on OpenGL 3.3 and later. Please also ensure that your card is running the latest drivers. On Mac, you can do this by updating to the latest operating system updates. On Windows, please update by downloading and installing the latest drivers from your manufacturer’s website:

Camera Raw 9.0 is now available as a final release through the update mechanism in Photoshop CS6 and Photoshop CC.

As mentioned here, updates to Camera Raw for Photoshop CS6 only include new camera support, lens profile support, and bug fixes. The new features listed in the release notes are only available in Photoshop CC.

New Features

Merge to HDR and Panorama

Combine your photos to produce panoramas and HDR images in ACR. The merged result is a DNG file and is saved to disk alongside the input images. If you are merging raw files, then the merge is performed using raw image data and the resulting DNG is just as much a raw file as the originals (and retains all the editing flexibility that comes with shooting raw). Because of this, you no longer need to edit your photos before merging. To see the new Merge feature in action, check out these videos: Merge to Pano | Merge to HDR

Usage Instructions:

To merge files in ACR, select the photos that you want to merge then press the “Merge…” button at the top of the filmstrip. Select “Panorama” or “HDR” from the pop-up menu.

After a preview of the merge is generated, select desired options in the merge preview dialog and click the “Merge” button to start a full-size merge.

The full-size merge is performed in the background so you can continue to edit other photos or start other merges while you wait. To view status, or cancel a merge, press the link in the lower left area of the main ACR window (it will say “1 remaining” if you’ve started a merge).

Once the full-size merge is complete, the resulting DNG file will be added to the bottom of the filmstrip and be available for further editing.

HDR deghosting has three amounts: low, medium, and high. In order to make it easier to select the best option for a given image, a visualization option is also available

Known issues:

Color artifacts in deep shadow areas of some HDR merges with deghosting and HDR panorama merges.

If the merged pano result is larger than ACR’s largest supported image size then you will get an error. In future builds we plan on adding an option to scale the result so that it’s within ACR size limits.

Performance Improvements

Camera Raw can now use the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) to speed up interactive image editing. The GPU is particularly helpful when using high-resolution screens, such as 4K and 5K displays.

Minimum system requirements:

64-bit only

Mac OS 10.9 and higher or Windows 7 and higher

Usage Instructions:

Ensure then GPU support is enabled by visiting the Camera Raw Preferences dialog and check the “Use Graphics Processor” box at the bottom.

When this box is checked, Camera Raw will automatically determine whether the system’s GPU (if any) can be used to accelerate image drawing. If yes, Camera Raw will display the name of your graphics card below the checkbox. Otherwise, Camera Raw will display an error message.

Note that the GPU options in Photoshop’s Preferences and Bridge’s Preferences have no effect on Camera Raw.

Camera Raw’s GPU implementation is used only to accelerate the drawing of the main preview image within the Camera Raw dialog. It is not used for other tasks, such as saving images to disk, or opening images into Photoshop.

Scrubby Zoom: Camera Raw offers a “Scrubby Zoom” option in GPU mode. With the Zoom tool selected, click on the Zoom menu (bottom-left of the image preview). Select “Scrubby Zoom” from the bottom of the menu to toggle scrubby zoom behavior on/off. When enabled, click-dragging on an image with the zoom tool will zoom smoothly in and out.